#ea talks

[evasivaardilosa]

Help me

Who is the prettiest Edenian?

Kitana

Mileena

Jade

Tanya

Sindel

Rain

Voting ended onSep 11, 2023

I just confidently thought “X is the prettiest Edenian” only to start questioning myself because that isn’t such an easy thing to say. I’m not even sure I agree with my conclusion

[evasivaardilosa]

Reptile, the original Sub Scorp

[evasivaardilosa]

I do think Bi-Han was particularly mean to Smoke and I, I not necessarily believe it, but I think it would be cool if there was a story behind it

The best I could think so far is that Bi-Han was jealous of both his younger brothers. Just regular sibling jealousy. He, as the heir, had to learn and work and prove himself, while his brothers just got to (in his eyes) chill. He resents them both but Smoke got it worse because “you’re not even my real brother!”

Also if he perceived that his father favored them, he probably wondered why did he treat his adopted son better than his biological eldest son

It’s a theory, but I think it’s weak. Looking for alternatives

[evasivaardilosa]

Mk1!Sektor is a tech geek

Between the ninja trainings, he uses the shitty wifi connection they have at the Lin Kuei (which he set up himself, it took a lot to convince the old Grandmaster that it would be useful to have it) to watch a livestream of the release of the new iphone or something

Meanwhile, Bi-Han doesn’t know how to send an email. Most of the time he doesn’t get what the heck Sektor is blabbering about but he finds it charming that he is so passionate about this

He already thinks Sektor is much smarter than he is simply because he can make sense of these machines, and when he gets to show his actual skills in engineering and programming, Bi-Han is more impressed than he was by any type of magic he has seen before

[evasivaardilosa]

I think we were robbed of seeing Time Keeper Kitana learning that in Liu Kang’s timeline Mileena is her older twin, and having a moment of “why??” - she knows better than anyone that the Time Keeper doesn’t have full control of every single detail and free will still exists but this couldn’t have possibly happened on its own, Liu Kang must have had a hand in this-

And then she gets to watch mk1!Kitana and mk1!Mileena and their two-in-one parents and she feels a strange ache

And when she goes back to her timeline she looks at her Mileena (I have no idea of what Time Keeper Kitana did to her Mileena but she does exist because I said so) and she starts seeing her differently

[evasivaardilosa]

Spoiler-y thing about Bi-Han

(Expect a lot of these, there was so little of him (probably bc his role will be bigger and his arc continued in the next game) so I have lots of room to imagine stuff)

I said that it was funny to see how he reacted to seeing the money and that I never saw him as someone who wanted money.

Except…

His very first ending. Which is not canon but would be the only characterization of him for so long, and one of the few of him in life.

Mk1 Bi-Han was done with everything. With his family, with Liu Kang. Maybe his greed and obsession with power is motivated by a desire for freedom. He has just recently become Grandmaster so until yesterday he was living by his father’s rules, who he resents. This position of power lets him make his own choices for the first time and the last thing he wants is to be trapped in the same path. With the Lin Kuei powerful and ruling and with money and an undead army, he would be able to just sit back and relax, not take Liu Kang’s orders, let the rock army do the hard (and dangerous work), etc

Don’t get me wrong, in this hc of mine he is still pretty much evil. I like him evil just as much as I like him as a secret softie

The thing here is that Bi-Han is one of the most trapped by the narrative character ever. He never made it out in the other two timelines. The same game in which he would have retired if he had won is the one in which he is killed in canon. And where does he end after this death?

In the Netherrealm, as Quan Chi’s slave, doomed to be an assassin forever, to be involved with this shit and these people forever

Outside the story, because he dies in the first game and because every adaptation starts from there, we have to watch him die again and again, without any hope that he will ever not die because Kuai has to take his place and he has to take his new role eventually. There is something weirdly poetic actually about how Kuai’s arc can only start after Bi-Han dies and so Bi-Han always has to die for it to start its motions

(And also how Bi-Han is the only mk character permanently changed by death. The revenants come back and they don’t even have to always die. Hanzo when revived is just Scorpion Lite. Kuai got to be decyberized after dying. Bi-Han is the only one whose identities before and after death are so widely different)

So having freedom be his motivation and dream hits so hard for me. He can’t be free. He hasn’t, so far, ever been able to change his fate. Will he now?

[evasivaardilosa]

I was wondering if I could ship mk1!Bi-Han with Invasions!Hanzo

Realized Invasions!Hanzo would probably kill any version of Bi-Han faster than he did in mk9

But! Wouldn’t that be a much cooler concept for the Invasions season?

Instead of attacking Kuai and Harumi, Hanzo goes directly to Bi-Han to kill him before he has the chance to kill this Harumi

And Kuai goes to fight him because yeah he is angry at Bi-Han but he doesn’t want his brother murdered by some random guy from another timeline

I get that this would require Bi-Han and Kuai to talk at some point and we can’t have this in a sidestory like this, but wouldn’t it be fun??

I think I know what the next fic after I’m done with these two I’m working on will be

(Will this be BiHanzo? Probably not. It may still get the same ending as the canon Invasions story. It could even still go haru2scorp like Second Chances 2.0. It can go many ways)

(But answering the question: yes, I can ship mk1!Bi-Han with Invasions!Hanzo. It was a dumb question, actually, I never answer a “can I ship” question with a “no”)

[evasivaardilosa]

Thinking about how Liu Kang resented his role as the chosen one, but instead of getting rid of it and the tournament completely in his timeline he just greatly diminished its importance. It’s like he didn’t know how to shape his timeline without what is the most familiar to him, while still wanting to remove the burden he hated so much. The fights are not to death, the fate of the realms don’t directly depend on the tournament, Raiden doesn’t get disproportional pressure on him when things go to shit

Thinking also about Time Keeper Kitana’s comment about Tanya. We don’t know her Tanya, only that Kitana dislikes her, but we know that Liu Kang’s Tanya is a genuinely nice person who does her duty and loves her princess. In the previous timeline, Liu Kang probably didn’t know Tanya for long, while Kitana may have known her her entire life. No, I don’t think this means Kitana’s Tanya is the closest to her essence or anything, I think both of them and the other Tanyas we knew in previous timelines are equally true possibilities of who she can be. What I think is that Kitana had a stronger previous opinion of her. We don’t know if her Tanya is evil, as far as we know she could have tried making her good as part of making things better in her own timeline, she could have succeeded. She just doesn’t like her

In my mind these two are related, but I can’t fully word it

I don’t think we would find, among all the timelines, any that is perfectly balanced or anything of the sort. Because if they all have a kombatant as Time Keeper, and all kombatants are “human” (even the ones who are not literally human) in the sense that they have feelings and opinions and biases and memories of being a part of the story they now get to shape. They all have things they want and things they want to avoid

(I think Kronika “fuck you in particular, Raiden” wasn’t impartial either, even as the immortal eternal being who was meant for this role and lived countless eras)